The plot just keeps thickening around influencer Elle Ferguson‘s hasty departure from the upcoming season of The Block.
ICYMI, Ferguson and her fiancé, ex-AFL player Joel Patfull, were cast in The Block: Tree Change and left the show just a few days into filming.
At first it seemed the reason behind their exit was clear: Patfull’s mother was injured in a fall at her Adelaide home and the couple rushed to be by her side. Fair enough, right?
However, it all got a bit murky when the show’s host Scott Cam went on a rant about the pair, calling their exit “piss poor” and “un-Australian”. Surely he wouldn’t say that if their reasons for leaving were 100 per cent wholesome.
Nova hosts Ryan Fitzgerald and Michael Wipfli attempted to get to the bottom of the “he said, she said” on their radio show Fitzy & Wippa with pretty dire results.
In fact, Fitzgerald claimed that Patfull actually hung up the phone on him when he called for a comment this week.
During an on-air interview with Cam on Thursday’s Fitzy & Wippa, Wipfli said: “We rang them yesterday, [but] we can’t even play the audio because there isn’t anything to play.”
Fitzgerald went on to claim: “Elle picked up the phone and said ‘This is Joel’s phone.’ I said, ‘Hi Elle we’re looking for Joel, it’s Fitzy and Wippa here.’ And then Joel comes and goes ‘Hi, how are you guys?’ And we introduced ourselves again and then ‘bang’, he was gone. He hung up. He’s not a fan of the show.”
Yikes.
Honestly, this level of high drama is giving MAFS, not The Block. It’s been a whole mess. Initially, rumours were that the couple wanted to be able to travel between the set and Adelaide during filming, and left because they weren’t allowed to.
But The Block‘s executive producer Julian Cress hit back at this theory, telling the Herald Sun:
“There was a suggestion in the media that the reason they left the show was that they could not get any certainty from me as to whether I would let them go and visit [Joel’s] mother who was recovering from a fall.
“I can understand why they did not feel they didn’t get an answer to that question because they never asked it.”
Oooft.
Cam backed Cress’ comments during an appearance on the Kyle & Jackie O Show this week, saying:
“They didn’t mention the sick mum to us. If they had said to us ‘we need to go see my mum’, of course family comes first. We would have flown them back to Adelaide and flown them back.”
Cam added: “They spoke to our producer and said they had decided The Block isn’t on brand for them. It was chaos.”
Meanwhile, Elle Ferguson and Joel Patfull are yet to comment publicly on the matter. Please God, let there be a tell-all interview coming.
But while we wait for that, The Block: Tree Change premieres Sunday August 7 on Channel Nine.
